Older blog entries for mwh (starting at number 175)

zhaoway: Google suggests the term "real number" was coined to be the antonym of "imaginary number" (though I have my doubts). "Complex number" is due to Gauss, and if you mean "functional" as in "functional analysis" that must have been a frenchman... Google says Hadamard.

So, yes, English mathematics, like all the rest of the English language, could be said to have "agressively borrowed" the odd word here or there.

I suspect the people who wrote Jaguar's Mail.app didn't expect my 13K message python-dev folder. I hear Panther's version is better in this respect...

The hard drive in my machine died (fortunately with ample warning), so now I get the fun of setting up basically a new machine.

Boy do I hate doing this. Redhat 9 is significantly shinier than what I had before, though.

I seem to have written this during my iBook's time off the 'net:

There are many things to like about Cocoa. One is its glorious lack of minimality. I'm not sure I can really explain that remark. It could be the influence of the C++ performance/size obsession, but sometimes I get the feeling that OOP programmers strive for doing just the minimum.

Or, in XP terminology, "do the simplest thing that can possibly work".

I guess this segues into another thought: XP just doesn't apply for designing a resuable framework like Cocoa. You can't just merrily go on a refactoring spree through a framework (unless you want your users to shoot you when they upgrade). On the other hand, some of the XP maxims *do* apply: you shouldn't just add features without some use case. I guess the reason Cocoa is so comfortable is because the framework has matured while it was NextStep and there was an opportunity to throw lots of cruft out when it became Cocoa (dunno if that actually happened, but if it didn't there's an astonishing lack of historical crap in Cocoa).

Anyway, to contrive a free-software point, when looking for inspiration in framework design, look at Cocoa. Some of its features probably only really make sense in a somewhat dynamic language, so I don't know if (e.g.) Gnome could reach this level of flexibility and power (haven't looked at writing a Gnome app in a long time, admittedly).

Seem to be very busy at the moment. Having joined the uni climbing club is likely part of that. Monday and Tuesday each week are always very hectic at the moment.

Haven't found much time for hacking at all, which is partly a consequence of not having attached my iBook to the internet for some time. Haven't bought Panther yet -- wouldn't have had time to install it if I did -- but probably will fairly soon. NSController sounds interesting.

Bought a stack of Phillip Pullman books over the weekend, though. Seems a bit more interesting than that Potter rubbish :-)

We're Sorry.

The SourceForge.net Website is currently down for maintenance. We will be back shortly

Argh!

Have been hanging around in #lisp for a while. Got accused of being an "advogato superstar" by xach.

Oh but the web is a lousy place to look for information about mobile phones. My new phone (Samsung A800) makes the most irritating noise when you turn it on, and I haven't figured out how to make it stop yet. Anyone know?

dyork: It may not help you (at all) with maintaining a current website, but you could do worse than look at the templating system used by the Python website, ht2html.

A recent revision of this lets you write the .ht files in reStructuredText. For an example, see source and result.

I'm not sure this is what you're looking for, but it sure beats editing HTML by hand...

mikehearn's diary entries about COM have reminded me of a particular irritation I have with C.

What's a (built) C library? More or less, it's a blob of data (the most interesting of which is usually machine code) and a bunch of entry points -- indexes into this data.

This is not exactly information rich.

34. The string is a stark data structure and everywhere it is passed there is much duplication of process. It is a perfect vehicle for hiding information. -- Alan Perlis, http://www.cs.yale.edu/homes/perlis-alan/quotes.html

So, just given a C library, you don't have a hope of, say, writing Python bindings for that library. You don't know the number and types of argument the functions take (I'm not even sure you can easily tell which entry points are functions...). To get this information, you have to look at the headers, which can be more-or-less arbitrary C and so are not the easiest things in the world to parse and get useful information out of.

In a language that's less terrified of letting things happen at runtime, you can just ask.

You're never going to be able to generate wrappers totally automatically -- there's always likely to be fun with memory management -- but it could be less of a pain.

Maybe GCC-XML is the answer.

I'm not having a good day. I thought going on holiday was supposed to leave you refreshed and just dying to leap back into the daily grind. Not this time (holiday was good, mind, I'm just in a foul mood today).

So, thinks I, I'll do something useful, and make bug reports for a couple of reference leaks I've found in Python in the last week or so. And then SF falls off the net. Argh!

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